Biography
Theresa Williams is a novelist and lecturer in writing and literature at Bowling GreenStateUniversity in Bowling Green, Ohio.
She was born January 24, 1956, the youngest of three children, to Waldo J. (1914-1994) and Thelma V. (1925-1999) Aleshire.
Born in California, she spent most of her childhood in Jacksonville, North Carolina near Camp Lejeune Marine Corps Base.
In 1972 she met Charles Allen Williams, then a Marine. They married in 1974 and have three sons.
Williams earned her B.A. in studio art and English (1985) and her M.A. in English (1987) from East Carolina University (ECU) in Greenville, North Carolina, where she took two fiction writing classes with William Hallberg. Williams's Master's thesis, which focuses on the short fiction of J.D. Salinger and is titled From X to I: The Evolution of Salinger's Narrative Method, was directed by Hallberg and advised by Luke Whisnant. After graduating from ECU, Williams went to Bowling Green State University (BGSU), where she studied with Philip F. O'Connor and Al Young. At BGSU, Williams won the Devine Award for Fiction, a fellowship named after Richard Devine, a promising M.F.A. candidate tragically killed in a motorcycle accident in 1970; the judge for the Devine that year was Allen Wier. Williams earned her M.F.A. in 1989. The short stories that make up her M.F.A. thesis, titled The Gift of Healing, foreshadow Williams's concern with tragedy, healing, and survival. Williams is now a core faculty member in creative writing at BGSU.
Williams's first novel, The Secret of Hurricanes, published in 2002, was named a finalist for the Paterson Fiction Prize. The narrator of the novel, Pearl Starling, is an iconoclastic, 45-year-old hermit who makes her living weaving rugs. Pregnant, her condition is the gossip of her small North Carolina town. Despite the curiosity of the townspeople, the Pentecostal missionaries who make frequent visits to try to bring her back into the fold, and the shadow of her own harrowing past, Pearl lovingly, patiently, waits for her child to appear, all the while studiously guarding the identity of the child's father. "Hope and catastrophe surge through Williams's first novel," wrote a Kirkus Reviews critic, adding that Pearl has "a complexity of character that lifts the story and guides it to higher ground." Additional critics have commented about the influence of the southern setting in the novel. For example, Julie Haught, in her review of The Secret of Hurricanes in MAR (Mid-American Review), wrote that Pearl is similar to female characters in other Southern novels, such as Bastard Out of Carolina, The Color Purple, and Crimes of the Heart. However, wrote Haught, Pearl is not "a mere amalgam of familiar characters," but rather "a complex human being" struggling to tell her unborn daughter how to survive. June Pulliam also commented on the importance of the southern setting, calling The Secret of Hurricanes a "modern day Southern gothic" novel. Yet Pulliam added that Williams's novel "is no typical work in the genre" because the characters are less tragic victims and more "everyday individuals trying to weather the storms meted out to them." Of The Secret of Hurricanes, Elsa Gaztambide commented in Booklist that "[d]ysfunctional families" and "excruciating loneliness are at the core of this melancholy but very well written novel." And while Gaztambide's observation regarding the melancholy nature of Williams's first novel may be true, The Secret of Hurricanes also touches on the feasibility of physical and spiritual survival. Accordingly, the novel begins with an epigraph from Rumi: "...My story gets told in various ways: a romance, a dirty joke, a war, a vacancy." As Haught pointed out, "Pearl rejects the romance and the dirty joke and instead tells her life story as a warrior who has found the value of life in the battles for sheer survival." Thus, although Williams's novel may seem melancholy to some readers, the novel is also hopeful. It may be the hopeful mood of Williams's novel that prompted a reviewer at Publishers Weekly to comment, "It's a pity that Oprah has shuttered her book club, since this first novel about a woman overcoming a fractured past might have found a home with her." Finally, regarding the narrative style of the novel, while a Publishers Weekly reviewer complained that Williams's "main stylistic flaw is an overreliance on fragments for dramatic effect," Debbie Bogenschutz, a reviewer for Library Journal, in contrast, wrote that The Secret of Hurricanes "shows a poet's attention to language and subtext."
In addition to The Secret of Hurricanes, Williams has published short fiction in The Chattahoochee Review, SulphurRiver Literary Review, HungerMountain, and The Sun and poetry in several journals, including Paterson Literary Review and Visions International. Her poem, "Late September" was chosen as a finalist for the Allen Ginsberg Poetry Award in 1996. Her short stories, like The Secret of Hurricanes, are concerned with the inner life of Williams's female narrators.
When asked by Pam Kingsbury "What's the best day of your life?", Williams replied, "The day I was born." Williams told Kingsbury, "[E]veryone's existence is a miracle." In Williams's published works thus far, it would seem that the miracle of life is what many of her characters, despite life's calamities, are trying believe in, too.
Williams lives with her husband on a 12-acre farm in Bradner, Ohio.